Although 3D printers are all impressive technodoodads in their own right, the Holy Grail of 3D printing is Star Trek: The Next Generation’s futuristic replicator. An item like food or clothing is scanned on a molecular level and saved to disk, and identical clones of that item are then “printed” with a simple voice command.

Ortery’s Photosimilie 5000 3D Photocopier doesn’t have the functionality of a replicator, but it does feel, in many ways, like the prototype of one. It first surfaced back in 2008, and works like a 3D scanner: you simply place an object on the Ortery turntable inside, and a Canon DSLR takes 72, 360 degree photos of the item, illuminating them with 6400K of illumination for maximum clarity.

Connect the 3D Photocopier to your PC by USB 2.0 port and you can then transfer these images over as either GIF or Flash files, then transfer them to the Photosimile software to examine a 3D model of your photocopied object. You could presumably then hook your computer up to a 3D printer and squirt out a new plastic model of the scanned object.

It’s all pretty neat, but at $17,000, the Ortery Photosimilie 5000 3D Photocopier isn’t cheap, and until it can replicate fully edible cheeseburgers… well, we’re still pretty far off from our Gene Roddenberry future.